Photo credit: Anisa Shaikh
Looki was the first Westie to come into our
lives. I didn't even know what a
West Highland White Terrier was then.
I thought he was a Scottie dog.
What I did know though was that he was the dog next door. A scrapeen of curly, white fur and a
long pink, tongue. He had bright,
eager eyes and hardly ever made a sound….except for that last November.
I had not seen him for a couple of
months. I think he must have gone
to live in the country for the summer.
That must have been a big relief to him. It was for me too, because I did not have to think about him
on the other side of the wall in a yard about three metres by four, filled with
angle iron, welding equipment, bits of motorbikes, flowerpots, saucepans,
lamps, plastic tubing, broken furniture, flapping green tarpaulin and his own
excrement.
He never went out of the yard and no one
ever visited him, except presumably to feed and water him and to throw another
bit of rubbish somewhere in his vicinity.
His former owner, let's call him José, was pretty lax about cleaning up
the doggie doo and on a couple of occasions, when it reached the week mark, I
had to ask him to do it. I said
that it was because we were having a barbecue and the smell and flies were
terrible, but really it was because I felt desperately sorry for the poor
little dog. It made little
difference to the smell or the flies anyway as all he did was tip it over the
end wall of his patio and into the common land on the other side, just below
our terrace! Nice neighbours!
The only company Looki had in the two years
that he was living in that yard was the bucketful of wild terrapins that José
brought home one day. They spent a few scorching weeks wandering around the
patio with Looki, with not even a basin of water for them to cool off in. I saw him chasing them sometimes. One
day Steve (McQueen), the largest and strongest of the terrapins, made his great
escape and hopped over the wall and onto our terrace, which owing to building
works was starting to become a living room, but had no walls yet. We did the 'honourable' thing then and
gave him back to his 'owner'. But
then I started to feel very guilty about doing it. No bother to Steve, watching for his opportunity he made his
second Great Escape, this time over the wall at the end of the patio. He landed in a pile of poo and then
managed to find hiding, emerging again in the evening, when we saw him
patrolling the perimeter fencing at the bottom of the common land, charging up
and down it faster than any terrapin should with his head bobbing on his fully
extended wrinkly neck, looking for the point of least resistance and another
escape. So I sent Vic over the
wall with a ladder to fetch him back.
We put Steve into a box and I popped down
to the local Vet's where they told me that I really had to return it to the
'owner' and only if it escaped again after his owner being warned could I keep
it and release it to a sanctuary.
I went home and thought about it for a day
or two, while Steve, visibly depressed and refusing water and food, clattered
about in a makeshift pen.
Eventually I enlisted the help of a friend, coincidentally called Steve,
to drive me down to a little stream that he knew of where he often saw lots of
terrapins and I returned the hapless creature to the wild. I often thought that even if he was
eaten by a stork on his very first day of freedom, at least he was free
again. But I'm pretty certain he
is alive and thriving.
So that was the previous year and Looki was
absent the following summer, by which time we had our living room and bedroom
completed and our terrace had moved out by about four metres or so, so we could
no longer see into José's yard.
Sometimes Vic peered around the corner of our new building and at the
end of October/beginning of November he saw a shadow of the dog we had once
known. Obviously getting worn down
by the life he had, he was lacking the character or colour that he used to
possess and would sit just staring into space. At night, when Vic and I lay in bed, we used to hear Looki
crying. He wasn’t barking, there
was no point, no one ever came, and he wasn’t howling. He used to cry, quite softly, but
persistently.
That was when we both decided it was time
to do something.
Why had we not acted sooner? I ask myself this question over and
over again, but the fact is, we did not have a suitable environment for a pet,
nor did we have the stability in our own lives to take on the responsibility of
another living creature. I still
wish that I had done something sooner, but everything has its own time.
We dawdled for a day or two still, uneasy
about the confrontation that we knew we were about to have with our next-door
neighbour. We tried to work out a
scenario that would not put blame on him, fearing that he may get stubborn. Pride was a big factor here. A friend of ours even suggested that we
offered to buy the dog! The
thought of which galled me, but the sense of it struck me too. You see! My own pride was coming into play here also.
In the end, it was a very hot Sunday
afternoon and we had spent a couple of hours getting jarred up to give us a bit
of Dutch courage when there was a knock at the door. Vic went first and I was not far behind. It was our neighbour.
"I can't understand what he is
saying?" Said Vic.
So I asked him to repeat what he had said,
but slowly, for me.
"Would you like my dog…..as a
present?" Said José
I simply said…."yes…."
